Historic Resource Study Boston African American National Historic Site 31 December 2002 Kathryn Grover

127. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions to the Home for Aged Colored Women in Boston, 1860-1887,” NEHGR 156 (January 2002): 63-64.

128. See Whitehill, Boston, 50, and “A Boston Chronology,” in Krieger and Cobb with Turner, eds., Mapping Boston, 243. Thanks to Michael Terranova for these citations on the “brick only” rule.

129. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002. Terranova notes that other examples of this style are found on Joy Court, Holmes Alley, and on the north side of Pinkney Street.

130. Memorandum attached to Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 3.

131. Liberator 27 July 1833, 119. City directories in these years often listed occupants of 3 Smith Court as living at either rear 25 or rear 29 Belknap Street.

132. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 58. Daniels stated that the shop was the site of “secret councils, to devise ways and means of protection and general assistance” on the Underground Railroad; these councils, he continued, “were most frequently held at the shops or homes of Negroes. A barber shop of one Peter Howard, situated at the corner of Cambridge and Irving Streets, in the West End, was an early rendezvous.” The Howard shop was at an unnumbered location on Cambridge street in city directories from 1813 to 1829, listed at 8 Cambridge in 1830, and listed thereafter at 82 Cambridge Street. More research needs to be done in tax records on this and other African American businesses on Cambridge street.

133. The best account of the Minkins affair is Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 122-33.

134. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, “Introduction,” in Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings, 1832-1874 (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2002), states that Nell was born “on Beacon Hill . . . December 20, 1816, at 64 Kendall Street, Boston,” and cites for this statement page 10 of Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution but allows that that “(street name [is] not identified)” in that source. Nell stated on page 10 of Colored Patriots, “I was born on Beacon Hill, and from early childhood, have loved to visit the Eastern wing of the State House, and read the four stones taken from the monument that once towered from its summit.” Kendall Street in Boston is not on Beacon Hill; according to the list of streets maintained by the Boston city archives, it did not exist until 1845 and was not accepted until 1860. Kendall Street is in ward 11 and runs from Shawmut Avenue to Tremont Street. Nell died at 64 Kendall Street in 1874.

135. See “Address of Mr. Nell” in Proceedings: Agreeably to Previous Notice. By 1841 Battiste was running a boardinghouse and lived in Sun court, which ran from North Square to Ann Street. Nancy Woodson might have been the daughter of George Street bootblack and blacking maker Joseph Woodson.

136. On Nell’s early activity, see Liberator, 21 January 1832; 3 October 1832; 3 January 1833; and 30 March 1833; see also Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 251-52. Horton states that Nell’s October 1833 address at the second anniversary of Juvenile Garrison Independent Society was published in the New England Telegraph.

137. For examples of the placement advertisements Nell ran in the Liberator, see Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds.,William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings, 1832-1874 (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2002), 15-16.

138. Wesley and Uzelac, eds.,William Cooper Nell, 23-24. Nell’s sister Frances must have accompanied him to Rochester, for in Rochester she married the barber Benjamin Frances Cleggett. She, if not her husband, may have resettled in Boston by 1855. See Kathryn Grover, Make a Way Somehow: African Americans in a Northern Community (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 178-79, 226, on Nell’s work for Douglass and the presence of him and his sister in Rochester. John V. DeGrasse’s medical account book is the source of our contention that Frances Nell Cleggett was living in Boston by 1855. On 3 March 1855 DeGrasse vaccinated a child for “Mrs. Clegget,” living at 1 Southac Court. The sister of both William C. and Frances Nell, Louisa Nell, had married Ira Smith Gray, who was living close by on Southac Street in the 1850s. See the DeGrasse-Howard Papers, box 1, folder 2. The inside flyleaf reads, “Dr. John V. DeGrasse/Jan. 10^th 1853./Boston/Office no. 17 Poplar St,” which establishes his office location, but the entries actually begin 25 October 1852 and end 25 June 1855. They are followed by an alphabetical listing of patients, most of them with addresses, and then by a continuation of accounts organized by patients’ names; these accounts continue through June 1857.

139. Wesley, “Introduction,” in Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William C. Nell, 46-47; they note that the federal law (document #458) “to remove all disqualification of color in carrying the mails” did not pass the 37^th Congress 2d sess. S. 237 until 19 December 1864, after Nell became a clerk; Nell’s letter to Garrison is dated 9 April 1873.

140. See Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 457-58, for varying reports on the Weeden brothers’ father. See also Daniel Weeden Jr., Jamestown, R.I., manumission of slave Charles, 10 September 1794, and manumission certificates for ten slaves, 10 March 1775, Rhode Island Monthly Meeting slave manumissions, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

141. On the New England Freedom Association, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience, 144. In their introduction to William Cooper Nell, 18, Wesley and Uzelac state that the association was founded in 1843, though in “Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience, 215, Wesley stated the date of formation as 1842. See Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, 146-47, for a reprint of “Meeting of the New England Freedom Association, Liberator, 12 December 1845, which lists the officers and directors of the group.

142. “First of August in Boston,” Liberator, 7 August 1846, 127. Thanks to Joan Beaubian and Marlo Ramos for locating this article for us.

143. Weeden and William Wells Brown spoke at a Boston colored citizens meeting on 18 February 1848 about such an organization. See the Liberator, 27 July 1849, about the presentation to Garrison.

144. See Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 457 ff.

145. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28, has dated it to 1815-28.

146

. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, notes that Phinney sold several of these lots to African American men described as mariners as well as to the Sons of the African Society. On 9 July 1799 Phinney also purchased from Scipio Dalton one hundred acres in Passamaquody Bay in Maine; see SCD 192:93.

147. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28-30, citing Suffolk County Deeds 193:222 and 192:192.

148. Rosebrock has stated that Wilcox sold his property for $600 to Samuel D. Parker “still apparently without a building on it,” in 1815 (SCD 249:117), but this seems unlikely to us.

149. On this deed, SCD 249:117, Wilcox’s wife Chloe (or Cloey) signed with her mark.

150. See Wiggins, ed. Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 328-29, for a transcription of the 1815 letter to Locke. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 161, contains a reproduction of the Traveller’s passenger list, the original of which is in the Manuscripts Division, New Bedford Free Public Library.

151. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28-30, citing SCD 328:236 and 600:36. Rosebrock notes that the 1874 G. M. Hopkins Atlas of Boston incorrectly inscribed the properties on Smith Court. It labeled the west end of 3 Smith Court as #5 and as being owned by the heirs of George Washington. In fact #5 is the house just west of 3, which is the house owned by Washington’s heirs. Scott & Taylor owned 3 Smith Court. , Joseph Scarlett owned the house next to Holmes Alley, #7 Smith Court, and the house in back of it (now #7A); he did not own #5, as the map inscription has it.

152. Benjamin F. Washington is listed as a florist working and living on Pleasant Street in A. B. Sparrow, comp., The Stoughton Directory, 1902-3 (n.p.: Newton Journal Publishing Co., 1902). R. Adelaide Washington is shown as a florist living and working at 946 Pleasant Street in Directory of Stoughton Massachusetts 1921-2 (Boston: A. E. Foss Co., 1921).

153. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 25-28. The deed between Phinney and Guss is SCD 192:135. Guss is listed as a black laborer in Mount Oreb in the Taking Book for 1798; see ibid., 26. Two deeds exist between Guss and John Williams: on 21 November 1798 he and his wife Nancy deeded to Williams his rights to a house “on land the property of James and Jeremiah Allen, which land is bounded on Buttolph St. and Southack St. a mutual release” (SCD 190:269), and the next day Guss appears to have purchased the property back from Williams with the land (SCD 190:269). His surname is spelled “Gust” in the 1810 federal census.

154

. At the time of his death in early February 1844 John Scarlett also owned land and a house at 9 South May Street, one-seventh of a house and land at 710 Washington Street, and one-fifth of a house and land at 17 Belknap Street, which, with the 11 South May Street property, were collectively worth $1,264.69 when outstanding mortgages were subtracted from their appraised value. The Belknap Street property was described as “one undivided fifth part of a certain half part of a wooden dwelling house” on a passageway, probably Smith Place. See Carol Buchalter Stapp, “Afro-Americans in Antebellum Boston: An Analysis of Probate Records” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 1990), 2: 598.

155. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 25-28, citing SCD 193:223, and memo to Rushing and Bower, 2. This was probably the Richard Johnson whom William C. Nell later described in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 90-91, who was indeed a mariner and had been taken prisoner for six months during the War of 1812. But Johnson was better known as a trader and abolitionist in New Bedford; in 1850 he was the most affluent man of color in the city. With another mariner and black activist, William Vincent, he was the first Liberator agent in New Bedford and a subscriber from the first issue. Johnson was among those men of color who attended the 1831 meeting in Boston to discuss the formation of a college for people of color in the United States.

156. See Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 165-66.

157. A habbitmaker is a tailor who, in strict terms, makes loose-fitting garments for the clergy. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002. This was the school Primus Hall founded in 1798 and initially conducted in his home on Southac Street. this school in 1798, and initially it had been held in his home. According to an 1849 publication on Boston’s public schools, it moved to a location described as “a carpenter's shop...adjoining the old church,” until space for it was completed on the ground floor next door in 1808. See Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience, 209, which reproduces an engraving of the Smith School with its history below.

158. Terranova, e-mail to Grover, 21 July 2002, points out that Raillion did not actually sell his land for the Smith School; his creditors apparently took the land in a settlement and passed it on to Joseph Powars, who rented a tenement on the corner. Decades later Powars’s, heir, his daughter Joanna, sold it to the city of Boston. Terranova further suggests that William Henry probably named his son William Augustin after Augustin Raillion. The upper floors of the building on the site of the Smith School, whose first floor was a grocery for many years, were rented to people of color, as was the building next south of it on Belknap Street before it was razed and rebuilt as a stable. Both were owned by Nancy Collins, “spinster,” whose children were fathered by Augustin Raillion.

159

. Memorandum in Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block.” Henry’s 16 November 1835 inventory is in Suffolk County Probate Records #31072. The engraved view is a woodcut made in 1851 that primarily depicts the African Meeting House but shows at far right a small frame house where William Henry’s house would have been. It is shown in this view as one and a half stories with its gable end to the street and a center chimney. See ibid., 22.

160. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 9, 87, 141. Edward W. Gordon, “Beacon Hill/North Slope Cultural Resources Area Survey” (Final Report, Massachusetts Historical Commission, 26 November 2001), unpaginated, states that the Flemish-bond brickwork on the second story of 2 Smith Court suggests a construction date earlier than1853, “perhaps as early as the late 1810s.” However, our analysis and Terranova’s finds the brickwork pattern more a variation of American, or common, bond rather than Flemish.

161. They were married by Rev. Francis A. Matignon; see Town Records 30:268.

162. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 53-54.

163. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 141. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 22, states that the house facing Smith Court was originally two stories high. The 1884 information derives from a photograph in the collections of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 141 Cambridge Street, Boston.

164. The biographical background on Abbott comes from Gordon, “North Slope Survey.”

165. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 7, 59.

166. The first black Baptist church was founded in Savannah, Ga., in 1779, and there were African American churches in Petersburg, Richmond, and Wmsburg before 1785. But none of the original church structures of these congregations have survived. The authors contacted Leslie Hunt, Manuscripts Archivist at the Balch Institute, Philadephia; Jewell Anderson Dalrymple, Reference Coordinator, Georgia Historical Society; Michael Roudette, Reference Librarian, Schomburg Library, New York City; Donald Yacovone, Massachusetts Historical Society; Roy Finkenbine, Assistant Professor of History, University of Detroit; Richard K. Dozier, Professor of Architecture, Florida A & M; the Society of Architectural Historians through its listserv; John Michael Vlach, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, George Washington University; Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley; Martha J. McNamara, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maine; and Marilyn Richardson, Former Curator, Museum of Afro-American History (1989-1991), but no one has been able to document an earlier structure built for an African American congregation in the United States.

167

. George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750-1860 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 267.

168. The deed between Dalton and Phinney is dated 30 March 1799 and is SCD 191:199; according to Terranova, the deeds between Scipio Dalton and Cromwell Barnes are dated 11 March 1800 (SCD 194:86, 194:90). Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” cited an 1810 deed from Charles Cushing to Dalton (SCD 231:255), but Terranova states that this is apparently a release of an earlier mortgage from Dalton to Cushing.

169. William C. Nell, “History of the Belknap street Baptist Church,” Liberator, 19 November 1858, quoted in Bower, “African Meeting House,” Appendix I: 1-2; see also 46, 57.

170. Levesque, Black Boston, 266, 268.

171. Levesque, Black Boston, 268, 294 n. 7, states that Nell, in his 1858 “synoptical history” in the Liberator, named Dalton, Fairfield, Broomfield, Bailey, Winslow, Basset, and Robbins, but, strangely, did not mention either Paul or Cato Gardner, who is believed to have been the primary fund raiser in the African American community. Dalton asked to be dismissed from the First Baptist Church, but records do not show such a request from Gardner, Levesque notes. In addition, when the African Meeting House’s seventy-two pews were put up for sale to raise money for construction, twenty-four were purchased. However, Levesque’s note does not make clear whether the names of pew purchasers are listed in any church records or any other source.

172. Assessors’ records for Southac Street between 1835 and 1845 show that both Ward Jackson and Daniel Wild owned dwellings in which African Americans were tenants; these longstanding connections deserve further research.

173. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 15-17; Bower, “African Meeting House,” Appendix; Barbara Pearson, “Historic Structures Report: African Meeting House” (Boston: Museum of Afro-American History, 1982).

174. Shaw, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 269-71. On 17 November 1811 Wild and Bentley discharged their interest in the property to “Deacon Samuel Jasper or Deacons of the African Baptist Church and their successors in office . . . in trust for the Baptist Church.” Thanks to Michael Terranova for this information (SCD 264:18).

175. Pearson “Historic Structures Report,” citing Frederick C. Detwiller, “African Meeting House, Smith Court, Boston: An Architectural/Historical Analysis” (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1975). Both Bower, “African Meeting House,” 148-49, and Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 20, reiterate this hypothesis. Most of these authors suggest that Benjamin himself may have designed the African Meeting House.

176. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 10, 20; Thomas quoted in the Ruffin Papers, Howard University Library, and quoted in Cromwell, Other Brahmins, 36-37.

177. See Shaw, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 269-70, where he states Saunders was in the employ of Emperor Christophe (who committed suicide in 1820), and J. Marcus Mitchell, “The Paul Family,” Old-Time New England 53, 3 (Winter 1973): 73-77. For church membership figures, see Levesque, Black Boston, 271.

178. Levesque, Black Boston, 273-74; Hinks, To Awaken, 75, 101-2; A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Gunn, 1838), 83.

179. This discussion is taken from Levesque, Black Boston, 271-78. The editorial in New England Spectator was entitled “Errors of Influential Men” and appeared in the 18 October 1837 issue; it is reprinted in ibid., 277. Garrison’s reply was published in Liberator, 27 October 1837, and is reprinted in ibid., 278-79.

180. SCD 435:171.

181. Levesque, Black Boston, 279-83; Liberator, 10 August and 21 December 1838.

182. Liberator, 15 September 1841; Mrs. E. Barney in Anne Warren Weston Papers, Boston Public Library; and Donald Jacobs, “A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolution to the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968) 147, 227, cited in Bower, “African Meeting House,” appendix.

183. The “New Years Evening” date appears in the Liberator 2, 1, 7 January 1832, 3. The statement that the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded on 6 January 1832 and was organized in the basement of the African Meeting House is found in a retrospective article from the Liberator by William C. Nell, whose accounts we have found not always accurate. We have yet to check the letters of those who attended this organizational meeting to verify Nell’s statement.

184. Another African American, Charlotte Goddard is listed in the Boston directory of 1827 as running a boardinghouse on 85 Broad Street, not far from Ann Street, and in 1836 as running a shop next door to William Goddard’s boardinghouse of 1830, at 147 Ann Street.

185

. Born in Lunenberg, Adeline Faggins died in 1861 at the age of 62 years and 2 months in Cambridge, where she was living with her son William. Skeene was her second husband, whom she married at the Charles Street Baptist Church. Her marriage record lists her maiden name as Faguins; her first husband was Daniel Low. See the New England Historical Genealogical Register 88 (1934): 334. Her entry in Francis Jackson’s Boston Vigilance Committee Treasurers Accounts is dated 16 July 1857, when she was living at 9 Southac Place. Southac Place is only two doors down from the Hayden house at 66 Southac. It is now a parking lot behind 70-76 Phillips (formerly Southac) Street.

186. See Barbara Yocum, “Revised Draft Historic Structure Report: Smith School House, Boston African American National Historic Site, Boston Massachusetts” (Boston: National Park Service, North Atlantic Regional Office, 1992), for a far more detailed treatment of this site.

187. Just south of the Smith School site, on a lot owned by Nancy Collins, “Mrs. Jefferson & others” (no doubt Jane Jefferson, probably the widow of laborer Thomas Jefferson) were tenants in 1827. In 1831, the laborers Robert Morris and Robert Mitchell and the tailor Joseph J. Williams were tenants there. By 1835 the structure was converted into a stable.

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